What colour is the sky in your world?

When I was a child, they taught me that the sky is blue. I looked up and I saw blue above me. I sat down with my crayons and some paper and I coloured the bottom inch of the page green and the top inch blue. In between, I drew a house with four-paned windows, and a stick figure family that was bigger than the house.

As I grew older, I saw other drawings. Other people did not draw the sky at the top of the page and the grass at the bottom, with so much white space in between. In their drawings, the sky would meet the grass. I looked out my window and saw the horizon. There was nothing between the sky and the grass. So I made another drawing and I coloured the whole top half of the page blue and the bottom half green. I had to learn to leave room for people and houses, or draw them first. I wondered, for a little while, why I was not surrounded by blue. There was nothing between me and the sky. Why was it only blue when it was far away?

As a teenager, I joined the Air Cadets. I learned how airplanes work, and what lets them fly. I went up into the sky in gliders and powered craft. I saw what the tops of clouds looked like by looking down on them from above. I noticed, briefly, that the sky was still only blue at a distance. All around me, it was clear. I didn’t think about it much, though. I was flying!

In college, students talked about how the sky wasn’t really blue. Well, at least not all the time. The sky might be grey when rain was coming, black at night, and all sorts of reds, pinks and purples at sunset. Even when you could say that the sky was blue, there were all sorts of different shades of blue you might mean. We talked about it, debated about it, took photos and painted pictures. Through it all, if asked, I still would have said the sky was blue. Yes, there might be exceptions, or different ways of seeing things, but everyone knew that the sky was blue.

Tonight, though, I went outside and looked up. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen; just a moon and countless stars. As I looked, it suddenly occurred to me that there was truly nothing between me and infinity.

For the first time I wondered if there was really such a thing as a sky.

- Chicken Little